Editorial: Higher voting threshold not needed for city council races

Sioux Falls City Council Chair Rex Rolfing listens as fellow City Council member Theresa Stehly apologizes to the City Council after being gaveled down last week during a City Council meeting Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2016, at Carnegie Town Hall in downtown Sioux Falls.(Photo: Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader)Buy Photo

What does city councilor Rex Rolfing hope to achieve with his upcoming amendment to establish a majority-vote requirement in future city council elections?

His publicly stated rationale is that there’s no “legitimate” reason not to make council races as “important and meaningful as the mayor’s race.” That means forcing council campaigns to a runoff election if a "50 percent plus one vote" threshold isn’t met by the winner of races involving more than two contenders.

The current requirement to gain a seat at Carnegie Town Hall is to earn more votes than any other competitor and secure at least 34 percent of the vote.

Under those parameters, Rolfing and amendment supporter Michelle Erpenbach would have faced additional weeks of campaigning on their way to election runoffs in their 2010 council bids.

Councilor Pat Starr – who along with councilors Theresa Stehly and Greg Neitzert would also have gone to a runoff in 2016 under the proposed change – said he’s not bothered by the potential $80,000 price tag for runoffs because “there’s a cost to democracy.”

At the risk of softening all this self-importance over how to seat a city council, there are good reasons to vote down this amendment:

► Council positions don’t carry nearly the same weight as the top executive office in Sioux Falls’ strong-mayor form of city government. That is a legitimate reason not to make attaining the position as demanding or expensive.

► Spending a potential $80,000 for runoff elections to determine office-holders who represent only a portion of the city’s electorate might not be a proportional “cost to democracy.”

► The likelier prospect of facing a runoff, along with the additional time and money required for longer campaigns, puts grassroots candidates at a disadvantage to deeper-pocketed establishment candidates, a potentially greater cost to democracy.

If the goal is fairer representation through preventing the election of candidates supported only by a minority (rather than trying to keep rabble-rousers at bay), there are smarter and cheaper methods than defaulting to a delayed top-two runoff.

Alternatives like ranked-choice voting (or “instant runoffs”) allow voters to rank an array of candidates in order of preference, a process used in Twin Cities municipal elections. When there’s not a first-round majority winner, the rankings come into play, reflecting the will of voters more accurately than a later runoff with lower turnout than the original election.

Change for the sake of change isn’t necessarily a virtue. If our city council feels a better system is needed to produce democratic outcomes, let them be equally democratic in finding a method that won't leave the general citizenry shaking its collective head.